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Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

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Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#331

Post by brailsafe »

goldcd wrote: post #69
brailsafe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has told me that as an employee with no direct stake in the company, you should do little more than the minimum it takes to do what you're hired to do, and put all extra energy into literally anything else, like reducing your responsibility per dollar earned and total allotment of work hours. Anything else is a bad deal for you, but a great deal for real stakeholders. I say this, because most of the tim…

Way I see it, is that 'just doing the minimum' is utterly soul-destroying. And if you're doing that, then just you need to focus on everything else to stay sane. Work is never going to feel better. However, if you can find at least a bit of interest in something that you do, then it's rewarding to focus on it. You take pride in that 5%, you polish it, read up on it, stay a bit late to add that shiny new feature, you…

This is just pride in your work and a personal choice right? Which is great, but then sometimes you do this and it's so unreciprocated that you just burnout because you thought what you did mattered, and then your company fires you for whatever trite reason. That fucks with your head and it's probably not worth that much unless you know it can be.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#332

Post by brailsafe »

vecter wrote: post #260
brailsafe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has told me that as an employee with no direct stake in the company, you should do little more than the minimum it takes to do what you're hired to do, and put all extra energy into literally anything else, like reducing your responsibility per dollar earned and total allotment of work hours. Anything else is a bad deal for you, but a great deal for real stakeholders. I say this, because most of the tim…

Or you could work hard and advance your career.

Maybe, but only if you have control over that, and it's only a great deal if you can control it. Usually you control that if you're either a stakeholder, or you make smart choices in terms of what you work on and who you do it for, rather than to what degree you suffer. If you have no agency, and no way of getting that agency, then it's not worth displacing yourself past a certain point. If advancing your career because you suffered x amount only means you suffer more for the chance at a bit more money, bad deal.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#333

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #282
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong. The revenue impact of more manufacturing heavy and device heavy industries is lower for those engineers - that’s just how the overhead of other engineering and biotech companies work. Software is fundamentally different and the revenue impact can be multiples or even orders of magnitude higher, in really any industry or company type. Software engineers, even in Silicon valley, are underpaid relative to…

Employees aren't paid based off the value they provide, they're paid the least the company thinks they can pay to get an acceptable worker to fill he position.

That goes without saying and is already accounted for implicitly in anything I already wrote. You’re pointing this out like it’s a surprise or somehow contradicts what I wrote, but it doesn’t at all.

The “least they can pay” floor is just being moved up closer to the fair level indicated by the actual contribution to revenue.

Remote work just strips exploitative regional employers from their many decades of greedy free lunch setting the “least they can pay” floor much lower.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#334

Post by oblio »

levosmetalo wrote: post #76
senko wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one data point, people never discus before-tax salaries in my home country (Croatia), it's always after-taxes and all other mandatory deductions. I believe the same holds true for at least several other EU countries from the region.

Croatia, as well as other post Yugoslavia countries is more of an exception here.

It's not alone. In Romania salaries are negotiated based on net salary.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#335

Post by oblio »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #38
senko wrote: post #29

PSA: When comparing US and EU salaries (or anywhere, really), use total cost to employer (excluding fixed office costs), or total benefit to employee (incl. taxes paid in their name and health/retirement costs). US salaries are mostly discussed before taxes, while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

Having worked in many EU countries, I've never once had salary quoted or discussed after tax.

In Romania almost all salary negotiations, ranges, etc. are on net salary ("take home salary").

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#336

Post by oblio »

ulfw wrote: post #48
senko wrote: post #29

PSA: When comparing US and EU salaries (or anywhere, really), use total cost to employer (excluding fixed office costs), or total benefit to employee (incl. taxes paid in their name and health/retirement costs). US salaries are mostly discussed before taxes, while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

What you're saying is impossible. Prospective employers don't know what your exact after-tax income is as it depends on a lot of factors (dependents, marital status, etc)

It depends on the country. In Romania salaries are taxed at the source (employer), the tax rate is flat and there are 0 deductions that I know of.

So the employers knows for sure what the employee makes in 99% of cases. That's why salary negotiation is on net salary.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#337

Post by dominotw »

tomerico wrote: post #234
doctorbaum wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference, for the laymen

You only earn money if the stock price appreciate

so its like call options where employer eats the option fee?

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#338

Post by oblio »

isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #254
rightbyte wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most of our offices are in large cities like New York, London and Stockholm" I looked out my window and laugthed abit reading that. They can't compare Stockholm with London amd NY like that ... Spotify in Stockholm does not pay NY wages today atleast.

Are their glassdoor salaries accurate? 58000 kr/mo for senior developers? You could find similar jobs in Warsaw with half the cost of living.

Are jobs where developers make $7k per month that common in Poland, though?

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#339

Post by [deleted] »

burntoutfire wrote: post #219
dogma1138 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much were you hitting? I haven’t seen contracts that go that high, I’m on 140K base + car allowance now (8K), in total I make around 220-215K cash w/ bonuses. employer pension is about another 20K or so a year. IR35 made contracting complicated but even before that I’ve never seen anything that gets you to SV levels of total comp.

I've heard of contracts of 250K-300K GBP for senior architects positions.

[deleted]

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#340

Post by JoeAltmaier »

kshacker wrote: post #330
jld wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world where employees need to show up to 6X Co HQ everyday to work, the cost of living and the cost of hiring is directly linked (6x). But in a world where people can work anywhere, salaries will be disconnected from housing costs and we may see a lot of 6x companies happily slide lower. It will come down to how many employees meet the 6X Co's hiring bar and how good 6X Co is at turning new hires into productive…

Great points and I will add: It is easy for a thousand engineers to train in Bay Area and move elsewhere. But could another locale train a thousand engineers to be ready to employed in the Bay Area companies? In many cases, the value (initial value) comes from assimilating in the culture and while a lot of bigCos could still make people work in Bay Area before sending them home, the challenge is for these locations t…

I believe most Engineers in the Bay Area did train somewhere else. California has 1/4 immigrants from other countries, and some similar amount moved there from other states.
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